Poetic documentaries reflect past and present in a very specific way: They have minimal relation to the reality and display rather a combination of the reality and an imagined world of film artists. Poetic documentaries do not draw the historical world in a representative manner, but transform its material in a distinctive, visionary way. They represent creative treatment of actuality and are open for possibilities of alternative forms of points of view, solutions or knowledge.

All sorts of crises (political, economic, cultural) and times of upheaval and transformation seem to be particularly productive in producing poetic documentaries. Such avant-garde times of poetic film occur when traditional narratives no longer make sense and ambiguities come to the fore. With their fragmentary, associative, non-linear, unfinished encounter with the world, poetic documentaries break existing orders and hierarchies and try out new constellations, subjects and solutions. Through their voice fragments, their particular point of view, these films and their authors attempt to explicate and transform the environment. And sometimes these transformations are more honest than conventional narratives and ideologies.

In my lecture, I will use a few examples to demonstrate how poetic documentary films contribute to overcoming social crises in the past and the present. Additionally, I will illustrate how poetic documentaries and their mode of overcoming of crises - as an artistic, reflexion, research and didactic tool - can be used in higher education.

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